I haven’t played in a few years but this is how I remember the system working: RDO matches people into separate lobbies based on what version of the game they’re running and this check is done by hashing one or more files in the install directory. By adding junk data to one of those files you more or less guarantee that you’ll only ever encounter other people who have the same junk data added. It’s basically the dark souls password system with extra steps.

coordinating bullying with the intent of causing suicide is frowned upon

I don’t think that has been the case for at least a full console generation, maybe more.

Look at the rise and fall of pre-order goodies to get a rough estimate of when publishers really, really wanted you to buy the game day 1 (and when it stopped mattering as much)

any sufficiently advanced incompetence (elon musk) is indistinguishable from malice

the DDG browser can setup a “fake vpn” tracking blocker for your entire phone. Last I checked certain apps were excluded by default as the tech is quite new and some apps don’t work right with it. It’ll then give you an overview of how many tracking attempts it blocks for each app.

They probably still do a lot of those, but recently they’ve been using opinion writers to create outrage bait with writings they should know better than to print.

In the last few years they have been willing to post a large amount of transphobic nonsense. To the point where early in the year almost 1000 current or former contributors signed an open letter complaining about the issue (and made a callback to the paper doing roughly the same thing with gay and lesbian people in the 60s through 80s)